


The Memories That Never Were

by BenevolentErrancy



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Book: Dragon Age - Asunder, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fear Demons (Dragon Age), Gaslighting, Gen, Here Lies the Abyss, Non-Explicit Reference To Past Abuse, reference to past canonical character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-12 06:08:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7923490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BenevolentErrancy/pseuds/BenevolentErrancy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Fade is filled with deceptions and lies, with demons that are willing to twist reality to suit their whims. But there is truth there too, and little can prepare you when you must stare it down, face-to-face.<br/>Cole encounters a face from his past and memories that never existed, and must find the truth among them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Memories That Never Were

**Author's Note:**

> another prompt from my tumblr: "Cole seeing the possible life Original Cole could have if he was still alive while traveling The Fade"

Every step was was a trial.

The Fade was wrong, and Cole being here was _wrong_. It should be like home, but even in his hazy memories of it the Fade had never looked like this, it wasn't right, it was twisted, it felt like poison against his body, and no matter what he did he couldn't relax, couldn't release. This wasn't a place for the physical, but the more he tried to fall back into it, follow his instincts and fade, the more his muscles locked and burned under his skin.

What was worse though was how even as he seemed to become more real, he could feel the unrealities breathing down his neck. The Inquisitor, their companions, they were struggling with the bits of the Fade that simply were – gravity that twisted to whims and objects that were formed from memories and passions made physical – but Cole understood those, perhaps better than he understood the lazy gravity and invisible emotions of the mortal world. It was the song that was consuming him. It was... spiky. Red. And beneath there were words. Visions. Not a part of the song but a part of this _place_.

_A child's fearful cries, familiar to the depths of Cole's bones; a child's laughter, the same voice but as foreign, as wrong as this piece of the Fade felt._

“You'd think one visit to the Fade would be enough for most people,” Cole heard Varric comment up ahead to the Inquisitor as they dispatched the Fade's swarming denizens.

Cole couldn't focus on the Inquisitor's response though because he'd caught sight of a face in a murky green puddle – his own, a reflection, but wrong. The face wasn't shaped right, didn't move right, didn't follow his own movements. It looked... angry.

_The laughter was again crying, screaming, heartbroken and denied and vengeful._

Cole resisted pulling the edges of his hat down over his ears and ran to catch up with the others, heart pounding. _Wrong, wrong, wrong_ it was all wrong...

 _Cole,_ said the voice that lurked beneath the song, in the very fabric of this piece of the Fade. _I see you. I see you like you saw me._

“I can't see you at all,” Cole said.

_You did. I see you, Cole, but you, you saw Cole._

Cole didn't realize he'd stopped moving, that his feet had frozen not from the sucking quagmire of this twisted corner of the Fade but from emotions so strong and thick and suffocating that he could hardly breathe around them. He couldn't make a sound as he watched his companions continue, distracted by the approaching fearlings.

(The Inquisitor had called them spiders. That wasn't what Cole saw. His vision of them was less corporeal, less restricted by the way the Inquisitor and the others needed a physical entity to understand the shape of the experience. The fearlings that swarmed now were barely more than an idea, a collection of nauseating concepts given form, things Cole wanted to close his eyes to, covers his ears and ignore; they existed to cause fear, to make their victims fall and despair. If pressed though, he would say they reminded him of glint of metal in a dungeon, of gauntlet-covered hands snatching out at them from the darkness, from the pit of a tower, driven with righteousness and hatred and fear.)

It wasn't the fearlings that locked his legs now though, they were something to be overcome, to be stopped before they could hurt others.

 _You saw him and you killed him_ , the voice said.

“No,” Cole whispered back. He wasn't entirely sure if he said it out loud. “No, I didn't kill Cole. I tried to _save_ him. They locked him in the dark. They starved him. He was scared and I came to help.”

 _You're a demon,_ the voice said. _A demon just like they all know you are. They see you for the beast inside that boy's skin._

“I'm not– I'm not a _demon_. I don't... I don't want to be that. The Inquisitor doesn't think I am. Varric, Solas, they...”

_Did you tell them? Did you tell them how you wear his face now? That you stole it from a boy you killed in the dark, just like you killed all those other mages? You took his name, his memories, you took everything, and you just keep on taking, taking, taking. You're no better than any of the monsters you murder. Murder. You are a murderer._

“No. _Lies in the dark_ – you don't know, you don't know anything.” He was nearly sobbing now, but it came out so quietly, so cracked, it could hardly be heard over the chorus of weapons ahead of him as his companions were lead farther and farther away into the Fade, knocking back the fearlings.

“Of course I do. I was there. Did you know I was going to see my mother again, if you hadn't killed me?”

He may as well have been shot clean through with arrow; air exploded from his lungs in breathless, uncontainable horror as he stumbled backwards. He stood in front of himself. Or another Cole did. That Cole didn't look like him, not really. The blonde hair was still there, but trimmed neatly around his head like someone had cared enough about him to brush it back and even the ends, and the eyes were the same but no longer swathed in purple shadows instead bright and alive over rosy cheeks which were much fatter than the ones on Cole's gaunt face. This Cole wore sweeping robes, cuffs lined with delicate fur and a front decorated in bronze rivets; they were the sort of robes a Circle mage wore, not an apostate, not a poor boy stolen away and dying in a dungeon cell.

“When they let me out, they were going to teach me to control my magic,” the other-Cole said, voice thick with anger and accusation, nothing like the dry rasp Cole – Compassion – had heard when he'd been pulled from the Fade into a dank, dark cell. “There was a warm bed waiting for me in the apprentice dormitory – I've never had a bed of my own, but I was going to get one. I would have gotten to eat with the other apprentices, and explore the tower, and make _friends_.”

And Cole could see it. Staring into this other-Cole's eyes he could see exactly what he was talking about.

 _No demon appeared that night in cell. Cole hadn't been forgotten at all, that had been the vicious, wicked weavings a demon in another life had spun, a web of Despair, of hopelessness, until the poor boy had died alone hours before the guards had come to bring him before the First Enchanter, only for him to have been replace by an impostor wearing his face, dancing in his memories. Without the demon –_ I'm not, Cole wanted to sob, I'm not, I didn't – _the door open and warm light streamed into the room and metal gloves were laid with gentle compassion on the scared boy's shaking shoulders as they led him back into the warm heart of the Spire._

 _Up and up Cole –_ not Cole, the other-Cole, the true Cole – _was led through the Spire and the boy watched every new object, room, face with fascination that slowly over came the trepidation and fear of the dungeon. A necessary precaution that first night, but now, now he was being shown a bright, shining, beautiful world he could have never dreamed of while in his father's house. Finally he came before the grandest room he had ever seen, and was soon sat before First Enchanter Edmonde and Knight-Commander Eron. At first he had flinched away from Eron, who towered and loomed in his armour and who had a beard as dark as his father's, but the templar knelt down down and held Cole's hands between his metal gauntlets like they were something delicate and precious. Edmonde was so old that Cole couldn't feel remotely fearful around him or his gentle words and explanations. This was to be his home now. He would never again have to return to his father's house or feel the heavy weight of his tiny, precious sister's ghost. His finger was pricked and blood ran into a vial, but Cole felt no fear. This was not a punishment and he had experienced so much worse; this was to protect him, this was because these were people that_ cared _what happened to him, where he was._

“No, that's a lie,” Cole said, trying to tear his gaze away from the enormous, reflective eyes of the other-Cole. “They _forgot_ about him. _Another abomination, can never trust the small ones they're mean little assholes, this one killed his father I heard, sister too. A monster, already a monster, put him in the room we'll deal with it later, do him good to know who's in charge here. No one's coming, only the dark to hold me, clawing at the walls and the only warmth is blood on my fingers, help me, help me, please don't leave me._ Someone listened.”

“Is that what you do?” the voice whispered, except it was Cole's voice. “Listen? Wait and listen for the despair in them and then strike?”

“ _No-o._ ”

“I was going to pass my Harrowing,” the other-Cole continued.

Cole only realized he'd started to cry when the reflection in the other-Cole's eyes wavered before him.

 _So proud. He'd never been_ proud _before, not like this. He'd been proud when he'd taught Bunny how to weave flowers into her hair and button holes, proud when those little flowers had made his mother smile, until she'd made them take them out before their father saw. He'd been proud when he'd managed to bundle an entire bail of hay together, until his father had knocked him aside and undone it, telling him exactly how lopsided it was, exactly how useless he was. He'd been proud – scared and proud – when he'd made tiny flames appear in his hands because even his father couldn't do this, even his father wasn't strong in this way. Now though he fell out of the Harrowing chamber on shaky legs and stumbled immediately to his friend who had been waiting anxious outside for him. She hugged him and laughed and cried and he'd beamed because he'd done it, he'd passed his Harrowing. He was a true mage now. That night after lights-out he and the other apprentices he shared a room with pushed all their beds together and celebrated long into the night with food one of the kind Senior Enchanters had helped them smuggle to their dormitory behind the templars' backs; this was Cole's last night in this room before he moved his stuff up to the mage dormitories. Cole was ever sweet and considerate and he had many friends within the Spire, and they celebrated Cole's success and the hope that all the rest of them soon join him up in the mage dorms._

“I was going to have friends. What did you do? You took my life and instead you just lived in the Pit like a _rat_. You only ever even spoke to one other person and he _hates you._ ”

“Desperate eyes willing to see anything in the dark, they see me, fear and acceptance, but the rest... the rest forget. I didn't know then that I could stop it. Gazes washing over me like water from the Pit, cold and oily and then gone.”

“Don't _lie_ ,” the other-Cole shouted in his face. “You were _afraid_. It wouldn't have mattered if they could see you or not you stayed in that Pit because you were a cowarding beast who stays away from the light, from people and joy and happiness. It wasn't me who was afraid, it was _you_. You were so scared of the templars you didn't even try to do anything about it. Besides, why should you? It was the dungeon where the 'desperate' where. The people who would see you, so you could kill them like you killed me.”

“Please,” Cole begged, but the other-Cole just pressed closer, pushing into his space until he was everything, until there was nothing but the terrible truths he hissed at Cole.

“That girl? Who would have hugged me after my Harrowing? I would have kissed her two months later when she passed hers. I would have met her years before that, when another apprentice hit her – I would have defended her. I would have been beaten by the other boy but I wouldn't have minded, because she'd jumped into the fray too and defended herself; we would have fought for each other, we would have become stronger for each other. Instead, since you killed me and couldn't be bothered to leave your pathetic little lair no one helped her. The boy kept hurting her and never stopped. She never passed her Harrowing, she accepted a demon's offer because it promised to protect her from that boy. We would have been happy.

“And what about _you?_ There were only two people who ever even _liked_ you, until Lord Seeker Lambert revealed what you were. Then what did they do, demon? _What did they do?_ ”

“Not real,” said Cole into his own twisting, fretting hands. “A demon who forgot he wasn't human, twirling masks in a palace, a Spire, in the sewers, torn away by words. _'It works on nothing else.'_ Realization and horror sharp as the Seeker's blade – what he'd always feared living in front of him but not – because I wasn't real. He left, forgot; I disappeared and lost my friends.”

“You had no friends. You took any chance I ever had at friends and polluted it with the mockery of a demon trying to pretend to be human. Rhys and Evangeline – you were such a coward you ran away before they could even say anything. They must hate you.”

“They were my friends,” Cole said, though the words were choked out around the uncertainty. “They... Rhys wrote to the Inquisitor about me. He _remembers_ me. And... and I have more friends now. They like me. People like me. They remember me and they do love me. Bright like a sunburst – _Cole_ – happy to see me, to hear me, I've never made anyone feel like that before, like I fill their heart and make it warm just by being me.”

The other-Cole let out a growl that seemed too jagged and serpentine to possibly have come from the human mouth but before Cole could take another step back the other-Cole grabbed his face in fingers that suddenly felt too strong, too long, and held him still.

“What about my mother?” the other-Cole demanded. “Did you ever try to tell her what you did? Does she even know my body was left to rot in a templar prison because of a demon that tricked me into believing it was kind? Is that how far your 'compassion' spreads? Shouldn't you be _desperate_ for the despair in her voice when she hears what you did to me? To hear about my death from a monster wearing my face?”

 _A woman who could have been beautiful if it wasn't for hunger and hard times was reflected in those eyes. A little cottage that tasted of home and warmth and family, of flowers in little a girl's hair and hard work in the barn and the smell of homemade bread long after it was eaten –_ no, that house never felt like that, Cole tried to remember, tried to remember the terror of hiding with Bunny in his arms, of knowing Father was coming, of being saved by Evangeline–

“Those are not your memories,” the voice, Cole, roared. “Thief! Those are not my memories! How dare you pretend to know my mind? I loved my mother and she's alone now. My father, my sister, me, we're all gone and you left her alone!”

_A young man stood in a field, tall and straight backed, body thickened from good meals and clad in a traveling robe that fluttered in the breeze. A staff was strapped to his back and its focus glinted in the sun. For just a moment he paused before the door of the cottage, one that seemed so much smaller than it ever had in his youth but which filled him with a tranquility he had not know in some time. Finally, with an eagerness that couldn't be contained, he knocked._

_That woman – prettier than in the last image, with rosy cheeks and blonde hair – opened the door. Her hands were to her mouth and tears were in her eyes before Cole could even finish saying “Hello, mother.”_

“ _My boy, my boy,” she cried, holding him close, though he was much taller than he had been last time. A child come back a man, and a mother who couldn't be prouder._

_Cole was brought into the house and soon sat before a little peat fire, drinking tea and telling his mother all about the years he had spent in the Circle, about the friends he'd made, the education he been gifted and the strength it had given him. He told her about being recruited with the other mages into the folds of the Inquisition and the good work he was doing now. He told her about how he had personally met the Inquisitor, about the drinks in the tavern they'd shared, about the sweet way the Inquisitor smiled..._

“The Inquisitor is my friend,” Cole whispered, but the other-Cole's fingers held him still. He couldn't get the image out of his head, the way the other-Inquisitor, the could-have-been-Inquisitor, had smiled at a completely different Cole. A Cole who had never met a demon, who was nothing like the Cole who now dared call the Inquisitor a friend. Would the Inquisitor have liked the real Cole more? Liked what he could have been if he hadn't died? Was he... was he truly such a poor substitute? Was he don't nothing but filling in for a friendship that should have blossomed but had never even had a chance?

“I would have kissed the Inquisitor,” the other-Cole murmured, lips so close to Cole's ear that the breath tickled. Cole, or Compassion, or whatever he was, wanted to sob, overcome by emotions he didn't understand, that surely hurt more than they should, but he couldn't help it, couldn't stop himself. “You will never be anything but a pale imitation of what I should have been. You will never be able to give what I could have given the Inquisitor – given _anyone_. You are a fake. You are _nothing_.” A wail was bubbling up in Cole's chest that he tried to swallow down in hiccuping gasps but the other-Cole pressed on, relentless, fingers tightening until they were bruising but still nowhere near as painfully as the words. _“_ They are leaving you as we speaks, you are _that_ easily forgotten, that easily left, you are nothing to them, you are just a blade they use, a killer, a leashed demon, a–”

A bolt slammed home through Cole's – the other-Cole's – chest. For a moment the face, so much warmer and fuller than Cole's, than the dying boy's in the dungeon, became so familiar in its shock and fear and desperation before the blood splurted.

“ _No!_ ” Cole shrieked, grabbing at the other-Cole, hands immediately becoming slick with black blood. Again, he'd failed again, he couldn't watch Cole die again–

“Kid!”

And then there were hands pulling on him, pulling him away from Cole, except it wasn't Cole anymore. The human face had crumbled until it was replaced by green, sagging flesh surrounded by a web of bulbous tentacles rather than hair. Cole gaped at the dying Fear demon as Varric heaved him back, away from the creature's skeletal chest and out of the clutches of its massive, spidery appendages and fingers that had snuck around Cole's body without his notice, trapping him close.

“Kid, are you okay? Say something?”

He wanted to, he wanted to say something, anything, but he'd just seen Cole die again – had he killed Cole? Had he stopped him from living this life? Could he have been happy in the Circle, grown into a happy boy that new safety and love? Could he have become more than the body and mind Cole stole, one that was now forever starved and cold and beaten? Could he have fought harder, done more, anything to keep Cole from dying alone in that cell?

“Cole?”

Cole started in Varric's arms and stared up at the Inquisitor who'd sprinted over the moment Varric's initial shout had echoed across the Fade.

“I don't want to be that,” Cole said. Begged. Needed the Inquisitor to understand. “I don't want to be that ever again. If I do– kill me. You must kill me. I don't– I didn't mean to. I didn't–”

“Whoa there, kid, just take a deep breath. No one's going to kill you, and you didn't do anything wrong. It's okay.”

“No, it's _not_ okay. Varric, I... I did that. He could have lived – warm life, warm arms, warm heart, for the first time, little bunny hole filled with flowers, still there but covered, no longer cracking the earth. It could have been good; he could have been good.”

“Cole.” The Inquisitor knelt down and Varric moved aside to make room though he lingered nearby like a protective shadow, Bianca solid in his hands as he scanned the twisting horizon of the Fade. “Did it say something to you?”

“He– he showed me Cole. Showed me... showed me what his life would have been like. Without me. He said– said I killed him.” He finished in a whisper.

Rather than recoiling away in revulsion though like Cole had feared, there was on the briefest moments when Varric hissed a soft “ _shit_ ” before Cole found himself being tugged into strong, solid, _real_ arms. The Inquisitor laid a heavy hand on the back of Cole's neck, just beneath the rim of his hat, and held him close.

“It was a Fear demon, Cole,” the Inquisitor said. “Whatever it was showing you, it wasn't real. That wasn't real. The other Cole died, he could never have had whatever life that demon was trying to show. It never existed, but that's not your fault. You did everything you could.”

“But what if... I forgot once. Forgot what I was– _a new life built on another's memories and fear, lonely little ghost in the Spire, scared boy, not real and fading, pretending, pretending, pretending to be more to the mage and the templar that found it_ –”

“Cole, you told me you didn't kill him. You went to help him, you did everything you possibly could to help–”

“I did kill people though! I killed those mages, the ones in the Pit because I thought... I thought it made me real, and I...”

Fear in the Inquisitor's head, skittish like startled harts, but not of him. For him. _What did that creature say to him, how fucking dare it, I'd kill it again, should've gotten to it before Varric, should have noticed he'd fallen behind, how could I have missed it, flames let him be okay, I will get them all out of here, I have to..._

Instead of voicing the buzzing fear though the Inquisitor said very calmly, “We've all killed people, Cole. We're not – _I'm_ not – proud of all of it. I regret a lot of it. But we move on. We live. You didn't know what was happening to you, you were alone and scared, and maybe that doesn't make it okay but at least you understand. You've helped so many people Cole, you care so damn much, and it's going to take more than a pathetic Fear demon to change that. I, for one, don't believe you killed Cole. If you had been a demon why not possess him? You created your own body, you didn't take his, so what was the point otherwise? You are your own person, and you're important, to all of us. Do you understand me?”

Mutely Cole nodded against the sweat-soaked leather and armour his head was rested again. He couldn't quite get the image of Cole – healthy and growing and loving – out of his head but... he was real. And here. And he had friends, people that were important to him and who thought he was important to them.

Cole never got a life, and maybe, at one point, the need to give that life to Cole had broken a Compassion spirit so badly it had taken on a new form, new memories, in a desperate attempt to do so. But Cole wasn't just that Compassion spirit anymore, just like Varric wasn't the dwarf who'd once drank with birds and flowers and captains and legends, or how Leliana no longer sang songs about legends because she had lived them now and they'd chilled her, or how Cullen's hatred and fear had tempered into regret and purpose. Or how the Inquisitor's mind had changed too in so many blinding ways. ...Like how that mind had come to hold Cole – _this_ Cole, the real one, the live one – with such a spring of warmth of affection. People changed. The old Cole, the one locked in a templar cell, no longer had that opportunity. But the Cole now did – and he had changed, and he would change more – _It's what makes you human, kid,_ says a voice that doesn't sound like the Fade but like Varric, like a friend. Cole would live and fight and help in every way he could. So he took a deep breath, shoved aside those images of a different Cole living, and stood, retrieving the knives that he hadn't even noticed falling from his hands.

“You going to be okay, kid?” Varric asked, wide hand on Cole's back, steady, grounding. _You are real_ , it said even if Varric himself didn't know to say the words. _You are real and I am glad._

“Yes. I think we should stop the Nightmare.”

The Inquisitor gave him a look that said that what had just happened wouldn't be so easily forgotten, but Cole already knew that. He wasn't quite so much a spirit as he once was – memories stuck in a way they hadn't at one point, and he could feel the barbs of this one still dug into his mind, seeping poison. It hurt. But maybe it would be good to talk about with the Inquisitor, once they had stopped Nightmare from hurting anyone else, once they were back in the tavern's loft and Cole was between his crates, surrounded by the familiar thoughts and hurts of Skyhold, perhaps it would be good to speak of what the other-Cole – what the Fear demon – had shown him. Perhaps there was truth to it. Perhaps he should go find a woman who could almost be pretty, who lived alone in an empty farmer's cottage. Perhaps he just needed to hear someone tell him again that even if another Cole had lived, they were glad he was living now.

For now though, work awaited.

 


End file.
